The Axis of Evil, Confirmed

The document dump continues to produce:

The U.S. government has finally begun to release documents from the huge cache it has captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and they are being posted to the website of the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office. One of the most interesting reports to appear is an Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) review of Iraqi efforts to establish ties with the Saudi opposition in the years following the 1991 Gulf war. (Document # ISGZ-2004-009247; the Arabic original is available here. For the full text of our translation, click here.)

One section of this report has already been widely cited, because it mentions a meeting between the IIS and Osama bin Laden: on February 15, 1995, the IIS met with bin Laden in Sudan, and he made two requests of the Iraqis that 1) they broadcast the speeches of a radical Saudi cleric; and 2) they coordinate in attacking foreign forces inside Saudi Arabia.

That, of course, is startling news. Yet the document's significance is much broader. Bill Clinton introduced a novel concept into the U.S. understanding of terrorism which has far out-lived his presidency: namely, that states had become irrelevant and that even very major attacks were now the work of groups and "networks," unaided by states. This document, however, suggests otherwise: states remain important, and their resources far out-strip those of individuals and groups. This document also suggests that the much-ballyhooed division between "secular" and "Islamic" figures is, in fact, non-existent.

If John Negroponte did in fact fight tooth-and-nail to prevent these documents from being released, he ought to be fired immediately. They are essential to helping the American public understand why Iraq and Afghanistan matter.